November 20, 1945 was the opening day of the Trial of the Major war Criminals at Nuremberg, but a letter written by [Sir Hartley] Shawcross on November 4, 1945 reveals that he knew Goering was going to be executed at the end of it.

The Nuremberg trials, which started on November 20, 1945, are called “show trials” because the outcome was known before the trials began.

German war criminals on trial at the Nuremberg IMT

The first and best known of the show trials was the “Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal.” This was the show trial of the 24 most important captured leaders of Germany. It was held from November 20, 1945 to October 1, 1946. The photo above shows Hermann Goering on the far left, with Rudolf Hess sitting next to him. On the far right is Ernst Kaltenbrunner.

View of the bomb damage of Nürnberg Photo Credit: Charles J. Sheridan

Bombing Germany back to the stone age was not enough revenge for the Allies; they had to put on show trials.

The first trial, before the International Military Tribunal, had prosecutors and judges from the United States, Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union. A second set of trials, known as the Nuremberg Military Tribunals, was conducted by the United States only. The most famous of these trials were the Doctors’ Trial and the Judges’ Trial.

The Trial of the Major War Criminals began on November 20, 1945 when British judge Sir Goeffrey Lawrence called the court to order, saying “This trial, which is now about to begin, is unique in the annals of jurisprudence.” The trial ended nine months later on October 1, 1946.

The trial was unprecedented because the prosecutors who conducted the trial and the judges who made up the jury were both from the victorious Allies only. The International Tribunal and the charges against the Germans had been created under the terms of an agreement among the Allies, known as the London Charter, signed on August 8, 1945.

At the main trial, there were 100,000 documents accepted into evidence and the transcript of the trial filled 42 volumes with more than 5 million words. According to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Allied prosecutors submitted some 3,000 tons of records at the Nuremberg IMT. The defense was not allowed access to any documents except the ones that were actually used by the prosecution.

Nürnberg [Nuremberg] was famous for producing toys and gingerbread cookies, not war materials; it was the ideological center of Nazi Germany and Hitler’s favorite city. Nürnberg was regarded as the “most German” of all the cities in Germany, which made it a target for vindictive Allied bombing.

On the night of January 2, 1945, 514 British Lancaster bombers and 7 other British planes destroyed or damaged most of the old city, including the medieval walls, the historic castle and two centuries-old Gothic churches. At that point in the war, it was the most devastating air-raid attack on a civilian population and only the Allied bombing of Dresden, six weeks later, caused more damage and civilian deaths in Germany.

One wing of the Palace of Justice had to be restored by the forced labor of German prisoners, so that the show trials could be held in Room 600.

The entire Nuremberg International Military Tribunal trial was captured on film and shown to the world on TV. Newsreel films showed the city of Nürnberg as a pile of rubble, which had not yet been cleared when the trial started; the bodies of 20,000 German civilians were still buried under the destroyed buildings as the German war criminals were brought into the courtroom of the Palace of Justice. The Palace of Justice had suffered some damage in the Allied bombing of Nürnberg, but it had been restored by the forced labor of the conquered Germans before the trial began.

It was at the Nuremberg trials that the whole world learned for the first time about the German atrocities, including all the gory details of the shrunken heads, the soap made from human fat, the leather goods made from the skin of concentration camp prisoners, and the gas chambers which accounted for the majority of the deaths at Auschwitz and Majdanek, where the Russians testified that not less than 4 million people had died in the Auschwitz complex and another 1.5 million had died at the Majdanek camp. Today, the figures given for these camps is 1.1 million deaths at Auschwitz and 78,000 at Majdanek, including 59,000 Jews.

The Nuremberg IMT was more than just a trial. It was a graphic presentation to the entire world that the Allies had fought “the Good War” against the evil Nazis.

The following quote is from the web site of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:

The goals of the International Military Tribunal (IMT) transcended verdict and punishment. The creators of the court were deliberately assembling a public record of the horrific crimes committed by Germans during World War II, including those of the Holocaust. American chief prosecutor Robert Jackson worried that “unless record was made future generations would not believe how horrible the truth was.”

In order to avoid any accusation of exclusive reliance on personal testimony, which later generations might perceive to be biased, prosecutors decided to base their case primarily on thousands of documents written by the Germans themselves. These masses of documents were translated into the court’s four official languages, analyzed for their significance, and reproduced for distribution to defense attorneys and other trial participants. The prosecution presented other evidence through artifacts, diagrams, and photographs taken by Nazi photographers in concentration camps.

On the third day of his cross examination of Hermann Goering, American prosecutor Robert Jackson questioned him about the treatment of the Jews in Nazi Germany, including the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws on Citizenship which Goering had signed in September 1935.

Robert H. Jackson, chief US prosecutor at Nuremberg, during his closing address l

Then Jackson confronted Goering with the most incriminating piece of evidence in the entire trial: a letter dated July 31, 1941, in which Goering had ordered Reinhard Heydrich, the chief of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), to prepare a plan for the “Final solution of the Jewish question.” Goering testified that the German term “Die Endlösung” in the letter should have been translated as the “total solution,” and that it referred only to “the emigration of the Jews,” not the extermination of Jews.

The Protocols of the Wannsee Conference, at which the “Final Solution” was planned, were not found until 1947, so this important document was not included in the mountain of evidence introduced at the International Military Tribunal at which the German war criminals were tried for Crimes against Humanity.

Some people today claim that the Wannsee Conference never took place. Since the minutes of the meeting were not found until 1947, this is entirely possible. Adolf Eichmann was the man who allegedly wrote the minutes that were not found until 1947. He was put on trial in Israel so that he could elaborate on the plan to genocide the Jews, now known as “the Final Solution.”

Wannsee Conference was held here

The photograph above shows the large dining room of a villa on the Grossen Wannsee, a lake in the Wannsee suburb of Berlin, where the Conference on “The Final Solution of the Jewish Question” was held on January 20, 1942. This is the room where the plans for the genocide of the Jews were discussed. The villa is now a Holocaust Museum.

For the most part, the International Military Tribunal charged the defendants, not with individual responsibility for specific crimes, but with a “Common Plan” to commit crimes.

According to the book Justice at Nuremberg by Robert E. Conot, the idea for the Common Plan charges against the Germans came from Lieutenant Colonel Murray C. Bernays, a Lithuanian Jew who had emigrated to American in 1900 at the age of six.

Before the trial, according to Conot’s book, Churchill and Roosevelt’s adviser Henry Morgenthau, Jr. had advocated that “the principal Nazi leaders should be charged with their crimes, then summarily shot.” Bernays argued for a trial as “the educational and therapeutic opportunity of our generation.” Regarding the Nazi crimes, Bernays wrote “The crimes and atrocities were not single or unconnected, but the inevitable outcome of the basic criminal conspiracy of the Nazi party.”

There was nothing in international law which allowed a charge of participating in a “Common Plan.” The Nuremberg trials were conducted on the basis of new laws that were made up by the Allies AFTER the war, specifically for the German war criminals.

Any atrocities committed by the Allies were not considered war crimes. After the war, France passed a law that no French citizen could be charged with a war crime.

The Nuremberg trial had far-reaching consequences — for America and the world. In 1948 President Harry Truman desegregated the American armed forces, and in 1954 after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that school segregation was unconstitutional, Justice Robert Jackson, who participated in the decision, said that the Nuremberg experience and the “awful consequences of racial prejudice revealed by … the Nazi regime” had influenced his decision.

According to Conot’s book, before the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal proceedings began, there was no international criminal code; the barbaric practices of the Nazis became war crimes under international law, only after the IMT proceedings, when the United Nations passed the Genocide Convention and a Declaration of Human Rights.

After World War II, the rules of warfare changed: reprisals can no longer be taken against hostages or Prisoners of War; forced labor is now outlawed; captured partisans are given equal status with POWs. The Germans had been convicted of all these crimes before they were crimes. The verdicts at the Nuremberg IMT established international law and the actions of the Germans in World War II are now war crimes.

Regulations of all the major World War II armies now state that orders which would constitute the commission of a crime need not be obeyed. All the crimes that were revealed at the Nuremberg trial have now been incorporated into international law and the defense used at the Nuremberg trial by the German generals and admirals that they were just obeying orders is no longer valid.

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Lots of interesting information on the biased nature of the trials here – http://codoh.com/library/document/2369 and also the booklet NOT GUILTY AT NUREMBERG THE GERMAN DEFENSE CASE here – http://www.cwporter.com/innocent.htm Even without the holocaust propaganda the biased nature of the trials was evident in the charge of “waging aggressive war” in particular to the invasion of Poland. Germany invaded on September 1 1939 and the USSR invaded on September 17 1939 and divided that country between them. The soviet prosecutor at Nuremberg condemned the German invasion but ignored that of his own country! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Poland At Nuremberg the communists also tried to pin the blame for the Katyn massacre of Polish officers on the Germans. http://www.katyn.org.au

That’s interesting about “total solution” instead of “final solution”. It does seem “end” does mean “end or final”, but I don’t know German at all. I recall Albert Rosenberg was also talking about the term “extermination” in german. Is there actually translation room for this? Is it an established word or is it kind of made up? Has there been a study of this term in german?

Kageki wrote: “That’s interesting about “total solution” instead of “final solution”. It does seem “end” does mean “end or final”, but I don’t know German at all.”

The Nazis also spoke of “final solution”, but “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” doesn’t mean “killing them all”. Prominent Zionists already spoke of “The Final Solution of the Jewish Question” as early as in the 19th century and they of course didn’t mean “killing them all”.

Kageki wrote: “I recall Albert Rosenberg was also talking about the term “extermination” in german. Is there actually translation room for this? Is it an established word or is it kind of made up? Has there been a study of this term in german?”

“Ausrottung” means “extermination” but not only “extermination”.

Ausrottung: Extirpation, Extermination. (A New Compendious German and English Dictionary by William Dwight Whitney, Henry Holt & Co., New York, 1887.)

The word “Exterminate” comes from the Latin word “Exterminus”.
Ex-Terminus
Ex: to place outside
Terminus: the border

Alfred Rosenberg explaining the meaning of “Ausrottung” at Nuremberg:

MR. DODD: Yes, very well. Did you ever talk about the extermination of
the Jews?

ROSENBERG: I have not in general spoken about the extermination of the Jews in the sense of this term. One has to consider the words here. The term “extermination” has been used by the British Prime Minister…

MR. DODD: You will get around to the words. You just tell me now whether you ever said it or not? You said that, did you not?

ROSENBERG: Not in a single speech in that sense…

[…]

MR. DODD: Then you have written into your speech remarks about the
extermination of Jews, haven’t you? Answer that “yes” or “no.”

ROSENBERG: I have said already that that word does not have the sense which you attribute to it. [!!!]

[…]

Now this is also a memorandum of yours written by you about a discussion you had with Hitler on 12/14/1941, and it is quite clear from the first paragraph that you and Hitler were discussing a speech which you were to deliver in the Sportpalast in Berlin, and if you will look at the second paragraph, you will find these words:

“I remarked on the Jewish question that the comments about the New York Jews must perhaps be changed somewhat after the conclusion (of matters in the East). I took the standpoint not to speak of the extermination (Ausrottung) of Jewry. The Fuehrer affirmed this view and said that they had laid the burden of war on us and that they had brought the destruction; it is no wonder if the results would strike them first.”

MR. DOOD: Now, you have indicated that you have some difficulty with the meaning of that word, and I am going to ask you about the word “Ausrottung.” I am going to ask that you be shown you are familiar with the standard German-English dictionary, Cassell’s I suppose, are you? Do you know this word, ever heard of it?

ROSENBERG: No.

MR. DODD: This is something you will be interested in. Will you look up and read out to the Tribunal what the definition of “Ausrottung” is?

ROSENBERG: I do not need a foreign dictionary in order to explain the various meanings “Ausrottung” may have in the German language. One can exterminate an idea, an economic system a social order, and as a final consequence, also a group of human beings, certainly. Those are the many possibilities which are contained in that word. For that I do not need an English-German dictionary. Translations from German into English are so often wrong-and just as in that last document you have submitted to me, I heard again the translation of “Herrenrasse.” In the document itself “Herrenrasse” is not even mentioned; however, there is the term “en fallacious Herrenmenschentum” (a false master mankind). Apparently everything is translated here in another sense.

MR. DODD: All right, I am not interested in that. Let us stay on this term of “Ausrottung.” I take it then that you agree it does mean to “wipe out” or to “kill off,” as it is understood, and that you did use the term in speaking to Hitler.

ROSENBERG: Here I heard again a different translation, which again used new German words, so I cannot determine what you wanted to express in English.

MR. DODD: Are you very serious in pressing this apparent inability of yours to agree with me about this word or are you trying to kill time? Don’t you know that there are plenty of people in this courtroom who speak German and who agree that that word does mean to “wipe out,” to “extirpated?”

ROSENBERG: It means “to overcome” on one side and then it is to be used not with respect to individuals but rather to juridical entities, to certain historical traditions. On the other side this word has been used with respect to the German people and we have also not believed that in consequence thereof 60 millions of Germans would be shot.

The German word ausrotten had various meanings akin to “eliminated ” or ” dealt with”. When Nazis talked about the ” ausrotten” of Jewry it was never meant as extermination; that was a sinister US mistranslation . Here for example at 2 min30 sec the first Russians in June 1941 are ausgerottet ie dealt with but they are not exterminated!

Vyshinsky the great Show Trials jurist was Stalin’s henchman at Nuremberg. In the annals of jurisprudence there cannot have been a more compromised candidate as the Soviet hachet man than Vyshinsky. We are expected to wring our hands and hold back tears of rage whenever we hear of Ernst Janning the Nazi judge, but give this monster who could manufacture evidence at will a pass. His presence forever taints whatever credibilty the Nuremberg trials had. It also seems that too great a reliance was placed on Jews for clerking and interrogation duties. These had own axes to grind and thumbscrews to help the Germans confess. Its a sorry tale.

These are valiant efforts contained in your blog: very long-winded and tedious. However, your views will be forever relegated to WordPress or another obscure corner of the Internet because they’re incorrect and have little to no academic or factual support. Even a shred of credibility behind even one of your posts would cause you to shoot to instant renown in this subject area, in much the same way that the scientific world can marvel at the fellow who this year discovered a new moon of Neptune— not from a new telescopic array, but rather from his analysis of publicly-available images taken by the Hubble telescope between 2004 and 2009. The information was there for anyone to see, but one person’s brilliance and keen eye interpreted it correctly and he instantly received due credit from the broader community. In your case, unfortunately, the history has already been written of the subjects you’ve chosen. This is why no one is listening, save perhaps the stragglers with poor spelling you seem to encounter so often (and whom you relish the opportunity to take to task for their grammar, perhaps as a non sequitur/ad hominem because in the exchanges I’ve read, the things they’re saying are still largely correct and you are rarely able to rebut specific points they make). The things you post are simply of no consequence in the best cases, or just factually wrong in the worst, requiring no further debate. Indeed, the history has already been written, and the things you are prattling on about here will never catch on, never have any audience to speak of.

My point is this— this is why you’re here. This is what WordPress, and blogging in general, is for— to provide a little place of refuge for people like you and ideas like yours. What a wonderful iteration of the 1st Amendment! So prattle on.

Bernard is your little policeman from the ADL; here to defend the interests of his co- religionists. It is irritating to them that the internet and the First Amendment allows some unfiltered information to be distributed . Their fear is that people will lose trust in what they are spoon fed by the MSM, and their consequent loss of power.This can be seen today in the huge public opposition to western involvement in the war in Syria despite all the organs of the MSM banging the drums.
Keep up your good work Furtherglory..

” Even a shred of credibility behind even one of your posts would cause you to shoot to instant renown in this subject area, in much the same way that the scientific world can marvel at the fellow who this year discovered a new moon of Neptune— not from a new telescopic array, but rather from his analysis of publicly-available images taken by the Hubble telescope between 2004 and 2009. ”

Only a high-IQ Jew could write something so foolish and do so with no apparent shame. But I’m sure he doesn’t believe it- so what’s the point of posting something so absurd?

“Even a shred of credibility behind even one of your posts would cause you to shoot to instant renown in this subject area,”

…or a jail sentence in 17 countries. 😉

Don’t make as if there were no political interests behind the Nuremberg ‘trials’. Your example of a new moon of Neptune is ridiculous.

Many people realized how farcical the Nuremberg ‘trials’ were. For instance US Supreme Court Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone stated: “[Chief US prosecutor] Jackson is away conducting his high-grade lynching party in Nuremberg, I don’t mind what he does to the Nazis, but I hate to see the pretense that he is running a court and proceeding according to common law. This is a little too sanctimonious a fraud to meet my old-fashioned ideas.” And Associate Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas charged that the Allies were guilty of “substituting power for principle” at Nuremberg and later also wrote: “I thought at the time and still think that the Nuremberg trials were unprincipled. Law was created ex post facto to suit the passion and clamor of the time.”

You wrote: “This is why no one is listening, save perhaps the stragglers with poor spelling you seem to encounter so often (and whom you relish the opportunity to take to task for their grammar…”

Apparently, you have been reading my “very long-winded and tedious” blog posts for some time, since it has been awhile since I pointed out a spelling mistake.

You wrote: “The things you post are simply of no consequence in the best cases, or just factually wrong in the worst, requiring no further debate. Indeed, the history has already been written, and the things you are prattling on about here will never catch on, never have any audience to speak of.”

Many of the “things” that I have prattled on about have caught on, and I have an audience, which never ceases to amaze me. I never thought that this would happen when I wrote my first blog post, which is still getting hits.

You wrote: “Even a shred of credibility behind even one of your posts would cause you to shoot to instant renown in this subject area…”

I am constantly amazed that anyone reads my blog. You would be amazed too if you could see my “site stats.” I have shot to “instant renown,” but I don’t know why. Famous people and college professors have commented on my blog.

Bernard and his friends hate the internet because power to control , “educate”, and instruct the people of the west is being lost. Here in the UK over the last week we have had a united press, MSM and state BBC campaign to support and get involved in a new middle eastern war. However the British parliament tonight has voted NO against the government. Opposition to the war movement, has come from the internet, social media, yes even twitter ! No wonder the Bernards of this world hate the internet.

“The standard version of events is that the Allies examined 100,000 documents and chose 1,000 which were introduced into evidence, and that the original documents were then deposited in the Peace Palace at The Hague. This is rather inexact.

The documents used in evidence at Nuremberg consisted largely of “photocopies” of “copies”. Many of these original documents were written entirely on plain paper without handwritten markings of any kind, by unknown persons. Occasionally, there is an illegible initial or signature of a more or less unknown person certifying the document as a ‘true copy’.

[…]

The Hague has few, if any, original documents. The Hague has many original post-war ‘affidavits’, or sworn statements, the Tribunal Commission transcripts, and much valuable defense material.

[…]

The National Archives in Washington (see Telford Taylor’s Use of Captured German and Related Documents, A National Archive Conference) claim that the original documents are in The Hague. The Hague claims the original documents are in the National Archives.

The Stadtarchiv Nürnberg and the Bundesarchiv Koblenz also have no original documents, and both say the original documents are in Washington.

Since the originals are, in most cases, ‘copies’, there is often no proof that the documents in question ever existed.”

Your blog truly is a masterpiece of ironical writing ; I am a great admirer of your style.
Modern international law with respect to war crimes of course needs not only the laws in place but a police force and a court.
The International criminal court in the Hague where people can be indicted and tried for crimes like genocide, wars of aggression etc is not recognized by…..Israel and the USA along with China and India.
You correctly link the US desegregation and civil rights movement to the events of the previous decade in Europe . Indeed the whole counter culture movement of the 1960s, the European withdrawal from empire, the removal of barriers to non white immigration to Europe,, the US and Australia , would have been unthinkable to politicians and society in the 1930s. The triumph of the Marxists of the Frankfurt school supported by Jewish money and power in the media and institutions of the west which changed the western way of life turning all values turned upside down in such a brief period of history is astonishing.

I received my copy of Hanns and Rudolf: The German Jew and the Hunt for the Kommandant of Auschwitz yesterday, and must admit that it’s very interesting, well researched, and contains a lot of new information. You can see a couple of brief interviews with the author (the great-nephew of Hanns) on his website:http://thomasharding.com/

The book claims that British army Captain Hanns Alexander (German born Jew) was not only the man who forced Hedwig Hoess to disclose her husband’s whereabouts; who led the party that captured Hoess in the barn in Gottrupel, but he was also the man who secured the confession from Josef Kramer in which he admitted there were gas chambers at Birkenau after all (having denied their existence in his original affidavit).

The author interviewed Hoess granddaughter Brigette, who confirmed to him what she’d told Robert Faurisson: that the British tortured Hoess eldest child Hanns in an attempt to force his mother to talk. The author dismisses this, though he admits that most of his family believe is likely that Alexander was involved with partisans in the murder of Gustav Simon, and that Alexander not only led the ‘suicide’ cover-up story, but also stole Simon’s money.